Movement as Meditation: A Therapeutic Approach

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There was a time in my teaching journey when my classes consisted predominately of demonstration, repetition and analysis. I was a strong advocate of perfect alignment. It was what my teachers taught me and to this day I encourage individuals new to yoga to spend time studying lineages that encourage strong alignment. Practicing safe alignment early on a yoga path is like practicing piano scales. Once you know them you are free.

As my practice (and my body) changed so did my teaching. My hard, straight edges have softened. My teaching has a flow and an emphasis on breathing with that flow. I still offer alignment cues but the days of strong hands-on adjustments have disappeared. I’ve shifted my awareness from the external form of an asana to the internal. I no longer consider how I look, I consider how I feel.

Beginning on Tuesday, May 5th I am offering a new class at Samyama Yoga Center. We’ll meet each Tuesday and Thursday from 11:30 to 12:45. I’m calling it Movement and Meditation. Our intention will be to examine how our asana practice, in conjunction with our awareness of breath, can draw us toward a flow state as described by positive psychologist Mihály Csíkszentmihályi. After a short opening meditation we’ll transition toward sequences that move through active and passive shapes and encourage a sense of peaceful presence. We will also consider the clinical applications of this practice and how it might bring relief to chronic physical pain, anxiety, sleeplessness and mild mood disorders.

I hope you’ll join me.

Samyama Yoga Center
Tuesday and Thursdays from 11:30 to 12:45 beginning May 5, 2015

Who Is That Woman and What Has She Done to Mimm?

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CIMG0083I’m not feeling myself these days.  Wait.  That’s not entirely true.  I feel very much like myself when I’m in the studio practicing asana with a group of students.  That’s where I feel fully present.  In the moment.  At ease.  Loving and loved.

I’m very grateful, therefore, that in a few hours I’ll be in the studio teaching my facilitated Yin workshop, “Giving and Receiving.”  I’ve been looking forward to this workshop from the moment it was added to the Samyama schedule.

I am looking forward to it for all the right reasons.  It’s another opportunity to share the benefits of a quiet and soulful practice.  Plus partnered yin – an offshoot of traditional yin practice that asks two individuals to work as one – builds on a foundation of open trust.  Melting into the asana with your partner’s support explores ideas of control and release, surrender and outcome.

Meanwhile, outside of the studio, I have a stranglehold on control and outcome.  There’s little room for surrender and release.  I am preparing to move into my new home and have a clear image in my mind of how this should unfold.  But the image in my mind – the story I’m telling myself of how this should all happen – is not congruent with reality.  I’m surrounded by what I believe is chaos. My soft edges have begun to harden into corners.  I’ve lost my ability to roll.  I’ve lost my practice.

It doesn’t matter that the hurdles in front of me are joyful pursuits.  It doesn’t matter that the end-result, when the chaos around me clears and the dust settles, will be a home of my own.

I am desperate to be finished so that I can return to being the woman who remembers that this mad pursuit is like running a race with ghosts.  These walls that I call mine, this carpet, that furniture – these are all ghosts that will one day crumble to dust.  Yet I am desperate for the illusion of warmth and safety to wrap itself around me. I am desperate to wake each morning with the man I love snoring beside me. Desperate for a fresh cup of coffee and the latest Economist on a quiet Sunday.  I am desperate and I am in this race so that I can have the story I’ve told myself but there is no traction, my feet spin but I cannot move.

These cravings have filled the space once held by my practice.

Wanting to shape the future I see for myself is not a bad thing.  Locking in the trajectory of my future without accounting for all the variables that make life interesting is.  I want a home.  But if I’m ever to find it I need to surrender.  I need to loosen the grip I have on the outcome I see in my mind’s eye.  I need to soften my hard edges and learn to roll.

A New Practice

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To say it has been a busy few months is an understatement.

A friend asked the other day, “So, how do you feel now that it’s all over?”  She was referring to the conclusion of two years of study at Sofia University and the success of my final paper (which you can read here), my year-long adventure in yoga-therapy training at Niroga Institute, and the end of Samyama’s first 8-week teacher training program, The Dharma Path, where I had the honor of assisting John Berg in the teaching of asana and methodology.

“Are you excited?  Or is there a void?”

The possibility of there being a void in my life was something I hadn’t considered.  But Hillary’s question encouraged me to step back and assess how it felt to reach the end of this hectic and amazing chapter.  When I did, I realized there is indeed a gaping hole where writing assignments and reading texts and lesson preparations used to reside.  The undercurrent of urgency that roiled through my psyche has mellowed to a gentle ramble.  The fractal-esque symmetry of life’s repeating pattern of work, teach, study, sleep, work, teach, study, sleep has been disrupted.  Like a Jenga tower with one too many blocks pulled form its foundation, I’m teetering toward the unknown.  I’m restless.

And it’s unnerving.

It’s the faith I hold in the order of life that binds my fragile personal yoga practice together.  When my faith is challenged and order is disrupted, my practice is challenged, too.

The charge, however, is not how to keep my practice alive, it’s how to keep it moving forward.

The key, I think, is to accept this shift in my space/time continuum as a gift.  The end of school and the other recent commitments that took constant and attentive energy did not generate a gaping black hole.  Nor did they manifest a void in my life.  If anything, the end of these commitments created an opportunity for me to see my world and my personal practice with a new perspective.  I have a chance to re-tool my practice and to put the pieces of my life together in a new way.

And that’s what I intend to do.  To accept the gift of open space instead of searching for ways to see it filled.  Is it possible that this is what my personal practice was meant to be all along?  That I should allow my arms to open wide and that I should listen – really listen – to the sound of my breath and beating heart echoing in the space of a less busy life?

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The Dharma Path

IMG_2063Tonight I’m taking a break from my social media fast to share with you a program that will be starting at Samyama Yoga Center in Midtown, Palo Alto on Tuesday 7 October.

If you feel the calling to become a yoga teacher or if you want to immerse yourself in pure and true yoga study then you’ll want to join us for The Dharma Path. The Dharma Path is an 8-week, 200-hour Yoga Alliance sanctioned course. With the core curriculum being written and taught by John Berg with support from Natalie D’Onofrio, Hillary Easom, Lindsey Armien, Devin Begley, Louis Jackson, Anirudh Shastri, this comprehensive and intensive course will strengthen the relationship you have with your practice whether yours is a teaching path or not. I’ll be there, too, humbled and honored to be assisting John with asana and methodology.

Honestly? The Dharma Path is not for the faint hearted. John has created a teacher-training program filled with compassion, light and humor but one, too, that will challenge and call us to make a clear commitment to ourselves and to our practice.

I’m ready to make that commitment. Are you?

You can find out more by clicking here or by emailing our Program Director at natalie.d@samyamayogacenter.com.

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Pathway to Stillness

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The Opening Circle for the Pathway to Stillness Immersion will take place this Sunday the 27th of April at Samyama Yoga Center from 1:30 to 3:30 pm.

I am extremely honored that I was asked to join in this beautiful program. For four weeks participants will dive into an experience that will burnish the hard edges and soften the soul. We’ll be introduced to new ideas about meditation and how we can live our meditation moment to moment. We’ll enjoy sound and energetic healing. We’ll deepen our practice through pure yin and yin flow. Breath work, yoga nidra and journaling exercises will open our hearts and minds.

But I’m just a very small part of Pathway to Stillness. Leading our journey is John Berg, founder and director of Samyama Yoga Center. Also guiding us are teachers Natalie Donofrio and Lindsay Amrein, sound healer Devin Begley and vibrational healer Joanne Brohmer.

It’s not too late to enroll. If you would like to know more visit the Samyama website or stop by the studio at 2995 Middlefield Road.

Samyama Open House

To celebrate the beginning of our second Pathway immersion Samyama is hosting a Therapeutic Open House. Massage practitioner Paul Crowl, Sound Healer Devin Begley, Cranio-Sacral and Reiki specialist Joanne Brohmer and little ol’ me, the house reflexologist, are providing free (yes, FREE) sample treatments from 10:30 to 3:30 on Saturday 26th April and from 10:30 to 12:30 on Sunday 27th April.

Spaces are limited and appointments are filling up fast. Visit the website or stop by Samyama to book your time. Each treatment is twenty minutes long.

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Twelve Months

CIMG2733I didn’t see that one coming.  Looking back over my posts and reading what I was up to twelve months ago I discovered that I failed to write a final farewell to 2012. Not only that, but my last entry for the year espoused the benefits of eating meat.

Really? Seriously. Did not see that one coming.

It just goes to show you. Things change.

Three months later I wrote about my life as the accidental vegan.

By autumn I was a happy vegetarian 98% of the time. And that’s where I’ve settled. For now.

Like I said. Things change.

The year we say goodbye to this week is the year I began graduate school. Graduate school is challenging and I yearn for the day that I will once again read for pleasure.  But I love it.  It’s the year Samyama Yoga Center opened. Teaching at Samyama has changed my practice. Teaching there encourages me to try harder. To be better.

And yet, this was the year I gained and lost twenty pounds. It was the year I broke promises to myself, made new ones to replace the ones I allowed to slide and then broke those promises, too. I didn’t break every promise. But I broke enough of them to notice.

This was, then, the year I tried too hard and didn’t try hard enough. It was the year I found out I can juggle an amazing amount of metaphorical balls and it was the year I found out that sometimes when you drop a few of those balls the world keeps spinning.

In these twelve months I directed a fundraiser and produced a book. I raised money for two local charities. I didn’t do it alone and the process taught me important lessons about community and coöperation.

But at the end of the day, 2013 was a year like any other year. It brought joy and sadness. Excitement and disappointment. Hope and worry. I was fiercely loyal to friends and sometimes mean to acquaintances. I discovered my sense of humor was, on occasion, less funny and more hurtful. But I also discovered that I have a deep well of compassion.

I believe that in a decade’s time when I look back on this year I will say that 2013 was the year I finally had a clear vision of the woman I am meant to be (better late than never). I will say that it was the year I found the path that led me to her and that it was the year I realized it was the path I’d been walking on all along.

Many blessing to you all for a wondrous 2014.

There’s More than One Road to Travel

The Patanjali mural at Samyama Yoga Center in Palo Alto

The Patanjali mural at Samyama Yoga Center in Palo Alto

I sat in sukhasana for the first time in Mrs. Carey’s gym class. It was 1975 and I was a junior at Northwestern Lehigh High School. I didn’t know it was sukhasana. For that matter, neither did Mrs. Carey. Most of my classmates sat slumped, legs crossed. But I was in sukhasana. I didn’t know it. I could feel it.

It was ten years before I sat in sukhasana again.

It’s wrong to call the path I’ve walked for most of the past three decades a ‘yoga journey‘. If I’m to be truthful, it has been an ‘asana journey‘. Asana. Asana. Asana. For years I collected asanas like some people collect stamps. And why not? It was fun. I was young. And no one taught me any different. They may have tried, but I wasn’t listening.

I knew I was taking the ‘scenic route’. I knew there was more to yoga than asana. I craved something more – I was hungry for it – but I didn’t know where to begin.

I had the texts to prove it: the Gita and Upanishads, Patanjali and the Pradipika. I had books from teachers who brought yoga to the West. For a time I carried Iyengar‘s Light on Yoga with me as if it was the Holy Grail. I was a yoga poser. I was proving that what my teachers back at Northwestern said about me (“she’s a bright girl but she doesn’t apply herself”) was true.

Maybe I wasn’t ready. Maybe it’s true that the universe conspires to open your heart only when you’re ready to receive. I’m ready. Patanjali, my heart is open. Teach me.

Chapter 1

Samadhi Pada

1.1 Here begins the authoritative instruction on Yoga.

1.2 Yoga is the ability to direct the mind exclusively toward an object and sustain that direction without any distractions.

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California, Here I Come!

Mount Rushmore

Mount Rushmore (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

I’m sitting in the lobby of the Rushmore Holiday Inn, downtown Rapid City, South Dakota waiting for the shuttle that will take me to the airport and toward my journey home. The first ever Yoga Therapy Summit was more than I hoped for. Educational, inspiring, motivating and more. So much more. I have much to process and much to contemplate. I’m almost overwhelmed by the possibility and the potential and very, very humbled by how little I know and how much there is to learn.

I’m grateful for these three days and grateful to be returning to my regular teaching schedule on Tuesday the 17th:

Monday the 16th – This afternoon’s 1:00 class at Avenidas will be taught by Carla Wittenberg. My 7:30 Yin class at California Yoga Center will be taught by Nicole Wargo.

I’ll be back on the mat for these classes:

Tuesday the 17th:

9:00 California Yoga Center

4:00 Samyama Yoga Center (I’m subbing for Louis’s class)

Friday the 20th:

9:00 California Yoga Center

10:30 Avenidas

1:30 Samyama Yoga Center (Yin)

Saturday the 21st:

4:00 Samyama Yoga Center

And don’t forget! We’re relaunching our morning classes at Samyama next week.

I’ll be teaching on Tuesday and Thursday mornings from 7:00 to 8:15. YAY!!!  

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Don’t You Just Love that New Car Smell???

CIMG2291Yes, it is a weird title to a blog post about yoga. But I’m celebrating the purchase of a new car. No – not mine. I’ve happily paid off my Honda and intend to drive it into the ground. Let’s just say a friend who’s very closely associated with Samyama Yoga Center recently traded in his rockin’ sports car for…a luxury sedan. OH, but what a luxury sedan. I had the pleasure of being chauffeur driven the 200 yards from Philz to Samyama yesterday. Sweet ride.

Speaking of sweet rides and Samyama – I’ve exciting news! Morning classes are coming back. My summer hiatus was an opportunity to regroup and refuel and I’m making my return to mornings on Tuesdays and Thursdays from 7:00 to 8:15 beginning September 24th.

You’ll notice the class is shorter – seventy five minutes is a perfect morning practice. But there’s one other change, too.

Choice.

How we choose to carry ourselves from Point A to Point B is never the same. Some days we feel like flying down the freeway in our neon detailed leathers strapped around a BMW S1000 and some days we prefer a business suit and the coolly appointed comfort of a sedan. And so it is with yoga. On some mornings we crave music and vigorous movement. Some mornings it’s all about the silent slow flow.

Sharing the mornings with me will be Amy Rogg. You can get your Vinyasa on with her in the main studio while those of us who enjoy embracing the day with gentle introspection will cocoon ourselves in the practice studio.

Guests joining us in the mornings will have the choice of choosing the practice that best suits their needs on that particular morning.

I look forward to waking up with you!

Class Schedule Updates:

I’m away to the Yoga Therapy Summit in Rapid City, South Dakota this coming weekend and so there will be a few friends stepping in to lead my classes:

Friday 13 September: Lisa will be teaching my 9 AM class at California Yoga Center. Nicole will step in for my 11:30 class at Avenidas and Carla will teach my 1:30 Yin class at Samyama.

Saturday 14 September: Bethany will teach my 4 PM class at Samyama. (I accidentally began a vicious rumour that this afternoon class was going to be moving to 8:30 AM. I spoke too soon. We decided 4 PM was just perfect. We’re not going anywhere.)

Monday 15 September: The 1 PM class at Avenidas will be taught by Carla. My 7:30 Yin class at California Yoga Center will be cancelled this evening. We’ll resume again on the 23rd.

Visit my page to view my full class schedule.

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Class Update and Exciting News

I’m headed to Norfolk, Virginia at the end of the week. Please note the following changes to my teaching schedule:

Thursday, 29 August

  • Palo Alto Community Child Care: My 6:30 class is canceled this week. I will see you in September 5th.

Friday, 30 August

  • California Yoga Center: The incandescent Lisa will be teaching our 9:00 AM class.
  • Avenidas: The 10:30 class is canceled this week but we will have a make-up class on September 6th.
  • Samyama Yoga Center: Warm and wonderful Carla will teach our 1:30 Yin class.

Saturday, 31 August

  • Samyama Yoga Center: Vinyasa-loving Bethany will teach at 4:00. We’ll be back to our regularly scheduled slow flow on September 7th.

Monday, 2 September (Labor Day)

  • California Yoga Center: Our 7:30 Yin Class will be canceled on Labor Day. We’ll meet again on the 9th.

IMG_0156More Great News From Samyama Yoga Center….

A few posts back I introduced Devin Begley and Joanne Brohmer as Samyama Yoga Center’s new body therapists. We have two more to add to the team: Paul Crowl and….drum roll please….ME!

If you attend classes at Samyama then you’ll recognize Paul as the male energy behind the front desk. He provided this brief bio:

Paul Crowl is a certified massage therapist with more than twenty year’s experience. He was formally trained at Cypress Health Institute in Santa Cruz in Swedish massage and reflexology. He later studied the are of deep tissue bodywork with Michael DiBenedetto. His dedication to refining his craft and background in yoga and the healing arts lead him to being one of the more notable therapists in the Bay Area. With an intuitive touch and ability to read your breath, Paul will help you melt away tension and relieve unnecessary stress.

In addition to the classes I teach at Samyama, I now offer foot reflexology:

Mimm brings the ‘sole-ful’ healing of foot reflexology to Samyama. Her work – a combination of massage, warm stones, Reiki energy and modern reflexology techniques creates an unparalleled sense of balanced calm that supports health and wellness.

Mimm’s initial training was in sports massage and neuromuscular therapy from the National Institute in Dublin, Ireland. Although she enjoyed the intellectual challenge of clinical massage Mimm felt something lacking. She decided to explore body-energy modalities that not only soothed the body but settled the spirit.

“Reflexology has a quality to it that is soft and subtle. That’s why I love it. A profound change can take place in the most quiet of moments.”

In addition to her work in reflexology and the yoga classes she teaches at Samyama, Mimm is an artist and writer. She is currently completing her master’s degree in transpersonal psychology and will begin work toward her certificate in yoga therapy at Niroga Institute in Berkeley early next year.